I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.
“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.
I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”
“My parents were murdered in this house.”
“I know.”
“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”
I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”
No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.
I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.
She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”
She sounded like John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—the realtor who’d sold me the place.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”
She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”
“I was engaged when I bought the place.”
“But you never got married?” she asked.
“No.”
“Why?”
The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”
“How do you know?”
“I found out.”
I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.
“Emily, you need to go back.”
“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”
“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”
She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”
“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”
“So you’re a criminal.”
Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.
Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.
She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”
“I went back and forth.”
That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”
I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.
I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”
“I’m not going to shoot you.”
“Who are you going to shoot?”
“The person or people who murdered my parents.”
By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.
“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”
She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”
“We have to get you back now.”
She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.
Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”
“Give me the gun, Emily.”
She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”
“Who?”
“I’m not sure.”
A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.
“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.
“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”
“If you say so.”
My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”
“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”
Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.
Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.
The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.
I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.
I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.
The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.